What is the will to live?

[trenton]

I have been reading about people who survived extreme circumstances. I am currently reading Man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl. I have found some valuable lessons in how to manage one's relationship with suffering. I started exploring difficult situations like these partially because I noticed discrepancies in how moral philosophy is taught in western countries. I noticed that if applied consistently, then most people would fall in line with Nazis and remain passive during a genocide.

I therefore began challenging the moral frameworks with extreme scenarios that do not match western assumptions about love, meaning, purpose, morality, and existence. This included love in the darkest moments possible. I have found many interesting psychological insights that overlap with many areas of life including my relationship with death and human connection. Some of it made me cry due to imagery of a parent holding their dying child while singing a lullaby about how precious the child is regardless of circumstances.

I found that these lessons in love and resilience are relevant for me when I navigate darkness largely alone. I have found secular frameworks that offer equivalent benefits to religion without requiring faith in a supernatural entity or Savior. Love is something that cannot be taken away even in death as the being lives forever in your mind and heart along with the warmth they gave when alive. It is something that gives a person the will to live even when all else is lost.

This relates to an abusive situation I try to navigate with my family. I'm looking for psychological tools to prepare myself to potentially become split from an abusive family forever and find new meaning outside of the narratives they imposed on me. It is something I face largely alone and sometimes it contributes mental health problems by undermining my will to live. Much of my research focused on perpetrator psychology as in my previous thread, but the deeper problem is how perpetrators have impacted my relationship with meaning, life, purpose, love, and so forth.

So what is the will to live? Personally, when my family was cruel to me, I felt my reality fall apart along with my identity. The identity crisis never fully resolved. Part of me knew that my family was feeding me lies as they had no real moral philosophy. I sought to ground myself in truth, believing that the truth is what I live for. If I reject truth, then I reject myself, making self love in a sense impossible if I must be erased and live a lie such as a false identity. I came to spirituality partially because of seeking the true self. Learning was a method of seeking truth while using epistemology as a survival strategy.

It seems that the will to live is not merely a cost benefit analysis based on the pros and cons of staying alive. The consequentialist philosophy which western education is biased toward might guide someone toward this kind of assumption. There seems to be something prior to any rational or irrational cognitive layer that can be bypassed through love and without needing to argue with the content of the mind such as the exact right answer when struggling to find the words for experience. I seem to be leaning toward a detached, arational relationship with the mind, seeing that rationality or irrationality can be bypassed toward a deeper and more present being.

The will to live does not seem to merely be hope that things will get better. It seems to be a core self that refuses to be erased. Is this ego survival? Or is it something different? Why does it refuse to be erased? It seems to desire unconditional love, both offering and receiving. Maybe it is the work of some spiritual force, or maybe it is the structure of human survival, or maybe it is both. I don't really know what the will to live is or why it operates in this way. It is like a creative force seeking expression no matter the content of experience.

A relevant thread of this inquiry may be what is will. As for the will to live, what is it at it's core? It seems to be a creative force of love seeking truth to know itself. This seems to be at the heart of my will to live and why I haven't killed myself.

What do you think?

[gettoefl]

Forgive them as they know not what they do. Also take not one piece more of their shit. Cut these folks off root and branch. Only then can life be meaningful and purposeful. First few decades of life we have no say in what passes. We have to insert a full stop and go our own way. It is going to take time to adjust, settle and heal. This is the first beautiful stage of the self-directed life. Hang in there, take your time and set your stall for the long haul ahead. If you do it right, life hits bottom and then only gets better and better.

Edited Thursday at 11:02 AM by gettoefl

[trenton]

@gettoefl I have a question about forgive them as they know not what they do. Sometimes it appears that they do know what they do. For example, the sadistic pleasure in degrading me feels hard to ignore. They seem happy to cause me suffering and keep me beneath them. This makes me confused about forgive them as they know not what they do.

When there is apparent ill will and intentional harm, I find it much more difficult to forgive them. I feel a burning hatred and deep contempt for those who harmed me. Their degradation is unacceptable and intolerable. I understand that part, but I am lost on the forgiveness piece. I can't seem to let go of this resentment I hold toward people who degraded me, seemingly on purpose with sadistic pleasure.

[gettoefl]

1 hour ago, trenton said:

@gettoefl I have a question about forgive them as they know not what they do. Sometimes it appears that they do know what they do. For example, the sadistic pleasure in degrading me feels hard to ignore. They seem happy to cause me suffering and keep me beneath them. This makes me confused about forgive them as they know not what they do.

When there is apparent ill will and intentional harm, I find it much more difficult to forgive them. I feel a burning hatred and deep contempt for those who harmed me. Their degradation is unacceptable and intolerable. I understand that part, but I am lost on the forgiveness piece. I can't seem to let go of this resentment I hold toward people who degraded me, seemingly on purpose with sadistic pleasure.

Everyone just repeats patterns that they have been conditioned with. It is survival. They do to others what others do unto them. To forgive means they did not harm the essence of what you are. To do that is impossible. They harm themselves; they do not harm you. Any evil directed your way is fuel for your awakening. We need to suffer to wake up. If we don't suffer, we see no reason to change. 

[Someone here]

16 hours ago, trenton said:

The will to live does not seem to merely be hope that things will get better. It seems to be a core self that refuses to be erased. Is this ego survival? Or is it something different? Why does it refuse to be erased? It seems to desire unconditional love, both offering and receiving. Maybe it is the work of some spiritual force, or maybe it is the structure of human survival, or maybe it is both. I don't really know what the will to live is or why it operates in this way. It is like a creative force seeking expression no matter the content of experience.

A relevant thread of this inquiry may be what is will. As for the will to live, what is it at it's core? It seems to be a creative force of love seeking truth to know itself. This seems to be at the heart of my will to live and why I haven't killed myself.

What do you think?

Schopenhauer have said the will to live  isn’t a conscious decision or desire in the everyday sense. It’s a blind…irrational and constant drive that pushes all living beings to keep existing and  reproducing  and striving. it is an endless wanting whether for pleasure..success ..but most importantly survival itself.

it doesn’t operate through logic as we are all conscious that we will die one day and that survival is a doomed to fail project .

i think you can only find meaning to life if you transcend survival and find something of higher spiritual value . 

 

[VeganAwake]

The fear of death 

[Breakingthewall]

On 16/4/2026 at 2:08 PM, trenton said:

 

The will to live is an evolutionary structure. What wants to live, lives, or has more chances; what doesn't, dies. Multiply this by trillions of generations, in which what works is selected.

[trenton]

Maybe the question I need to ask is the following.

If someone has lost the will to live or is consumed by meaningless suffering which offers no hope of a better future, then what exactly is needed to re-establish a will to live? What exactly was lost that led to a person losing this will to live, and how can it be countered?

The fear of death doesn't seem to be universal as some come to welcome death given specific grievances. This can lead to suicide. What exactly was taken away such that the will to live is now gone and what is needed to restore it? This applies also to situations where the person is alone with nobody to help them as well.

[Ziran]

On 4/15/2026 at 9:24 PM, trenton said:

The will to live does not seem to merely be hope that things will get better. It seems to be a core self that refuses to be erased. Is this ego survival? Or is it something different?

It's a natural consequence of multiplicity emerging from a very special type of infinity, a unity lacking any division.

This emergence is ongoing, eternal, always and forever.  Each individual of the collective must, necessarily, push beyond itself, and the others to receive its vitality from the source, while simultaneously, the eternal-one, is rejecting it.  The imagery/metaphor traditionally used are seroents striking at their source which is always and forever "turning the other cheek", permitting the snakes to cleave and receive nourishment.  The will to live is this simultaneously leaping-striking-and-cleaving force. 

Edited 8 hours ago by Ziran

[Ziran]

{ duplicate post }

Edited 8 hours ago by Ziran

[TheCloud]

This is merely a possibility, but it could be that the will to live is simply a mechanical, evolutionary phenomenon.  We are each of us the result of a multi-billion year chain of organisms which, without exception, lived to reproduce.  No exceptions for billions of years.  That's plenty of time to weed out the organisms that fail to experience some minimum level of joy in living, at least among the organisms that can be said to have experiences.

The fringe case of human suicide could be mentioned, but suicide on humanity's level should be a relatively new phenomenon, evolutionarily speaking.  It may just not have been accounted for by selective pressures yet.  Though, at the rate we humans are modifying our environment, evolution may not get that chance.

In any case, perhaps the will to live resulted from nothing more than the fact that evolution fundamentally selects for life.  I'm not prepared to argue this in court, but I think it's worth pondering.

[gettoefl]

By being here, there isn't a will to live as much as an implicit contract to die. You are here to die. Seize the moment, break the chains. Don't be like the billions who passed before you. Break the mould. Escape the fetters. End the suffering. You need but a mustard seed of faith. Namely seek out someone who has walked the walk. Find that exemplar. This is the best time ever to be alive. You have more power in your hands that whole armies had before you. Make your life count. You have very few days left. 

Edited 6 hours ago by gettoefl

[trenton]

1 hour ago, TheCloud said:

This is merely a possibility, but it could be that the will to live is simply a mechanical, evolutionary phenomenon.  We are each of us the result of a multi-billion year chain of organisms which, without exception, lived to reproduce.  No exceptions for billions of years.  That's plenty of time to weed out the organisms that fail to experience some minimum level of joy in living, at least among the organisms that can be said to have experiences.

The fringe case of human suicide could be mentioned, but suicide on humanity's level should be a relatively new phenomenon, evolutionarily speaking.  It may just not have been accounted for by selective pressures yet.  Though, at the rate we humans are modifying our environment, evolution may not get that chance.

In any case, perhaps the will to live resulted from nothing more than the fact that evolution fundamentally selects for life.  I'm not prepared to argue this in court, but I think it's worth pondering.

When comparing humans to animals, I believe the way human institutions are structured likely contributes to maladaptive behavior on individual levels due to the belief that these structures are necessary for the collective good. For example, cases of animals sexually abusing juveniles of their kind is significantly less common in the wild compared to when animals are institutionalized. Putting animals in captivity tends to disrupt their natural attachments, contributing to various maladaptive behaviors. Likewise, human structures are likely unhealthy for individual humans in a variety of ways that might lead to maladaptive behaviors including suicide. The starkest example would be something like a death camp. While in a death camp, the survivors often held onto their bonds with loved ones as a form of meaning, knowing they would not face the darkness alone.

I haven't read much about suicidal behaviors in animals, but I believe it is significantly less common compared to humans. Humans seem to have a cognitive layer which makes them more likely to lose the will to live compared to animals, including ideologies that glorify things like suicide bombings as a political tool. In such situations "survival" has changed from protecting the body to living on in the memory of others through infamy. The human self seems to take on many different identities compared to animals, therefore in some contexts depending on how the self is defined, suicide might be seen as acceptable from that point of view.